Recent reviews by Dr. Swift

"A triumphant return to form." - Astroturf Magazine

Great little game for the price.

I love not being able to play the game that I paid for because of social club errors and external launchers.

Pure and simple, this game is a masterclass in supply chain management which balances realism with not being overly complex. This is clearly a passion project for the devs, and it shows in their attention to detail. I'm excited to see what will come in future updates.

This game is unfinished and should be early access, and if you look at the company's other offerings, it's clear this is their modus operandi; they release a new "dynasty" game every 1-2 years and it's the exact same thing with a new skin.

All of the following game elements serve absolutely NO PURPOSE:
- Upgraded food
- Taverns
- Alcohol
- Most potions/poisons
- Villager mood

Design wise, there are two critical problems with the progression in the game that severely hamper playability:
- Villager cooks are agonizingly slow, meaning you need to cook most of the food by hand. It's absolutely insane how slow they are.
- It is not possible to automate copper and tin despite them being used by the smithy very early in the production chain, which means you need to mine completely by hand. When you do unlock the mine, you can immediately transition to iron, defeating the entire point of having copper and tin limited to the mine.

Yeah.

The physics are way too overtuned. Driving a pickup truck up a hill or through some light mud shouldn't feel like ice skating. I get that this is the game's entire gimmick but the driving model punishes situations that should be relatively effortless and is unrealistic at best.

My 4 cylinder Honda hatchback handles mud better than the trucks in this game.

It's just not interesting or challenging. You spend a lot of time waiting around for stuff to happen. There also seems to be almost no tutorial at all, and I'm not sure I would have known how to play if I didn't have experience building computers. Finally, the camera controls are just awkward.

I owned this game on physical CD and am still coming back to it 15 years later. The definitive and best Total War game of all time. Shout out to the modding community, which is still thriving and continuing to give this game life.

The game concept is good and it's amazing to play with friends.

However, I'm leaving this review to protest how willingly disjoint the developers are from their own community. Despite the developers being active on both Reddit and Discord, they continually push out janky updates with obvious flaws, and then immediately backpedal them within days of release. The most recent update has issues that resulted in pretty universal outcry on their social media platforms, and all it would have taken was garnering community feedback or conducting focus groups on the proposed patch notes before pushing the release. Now we're stuck waiting for the devs to backpedal their changes (they have already said they will on Reddit), which could have been avoided had they done even a little bit of testing beforehand.

The worst part is that Steam literally supports version branching for testers. They could have just as easily pushed this update to people who opted in (AS THEY HAVE IN THE PAST) and gotten the same feedback that they are now getting.

Negative review for bad, amateurish development practices.